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We should be prepared for some disappointing results this week, although it looked as if some would be worse than others.

An overview of the currency markets for October 13th – October 17th 2014

Let’s begin another week with our usual first stop, which takes in the US dollar. Here we began on 1.6034 and had a good day on Monday, as the pound improved to 1.6090. This didn’t stay the same the following day though, which saw us drop to 1.5916. Would this be a week where the gains of one day were wiped out the next? Actually no, because the rest of the week looked far more encouraging. In fact by the time we reached Friday evening and trading was done for the week, we ended up on an exchange rate of 1.6119 against the US dollar.

Could we achieve the same against the euro? Here the pound opened trading for the week on 1.2687 and edged up marginally to 1.2690 by Monday evening. However we then saw a drop akin to the one we’d seen against the US dollar, by falling to 1.2586 by Tuesday night. The next couple of days were also disappointing, dragging us down to 1.2547 by Thursday evening. We managed to recoup some of the week’s losses by Friday night, improving to 1.2570 as we did so, but we didn’t regain our opening position.

How would things pan out against the Hong Kong dollar? Here we started out with a rate of 12.441 and we had a good day to begin with, rising to 12.483 in the process. But again Tuesday let us down, sending us back to 12.346. Fortunately this was the only day of the week where we struggled and that meant we were rather better off by Friday night. By this time we finished on 12.505, so we had a good result here.

On we go to see where the New Zealand dollar would leave us this week. Here we started on 2.0510 and then dropped to 2.0440 by Monday evening. We had another drop on Tuesday too, this time to 2.0245. Indeed this looked as though it would be a poor week, because although we did well on Wednesday we struggled to regain any of the losses we had gone through so far. By the time Friday night arrived the pound had fallen to a disappointing 2.0289.

Finally we have just one stop to go, to see whether the pound could achieve anything against the Australian dollar. Here too we had a poor start, beginning on 1.8410 and then dropping to 1.8219 by the time Tuesday evening rolled around. We then had a couple of reasonable days, as we climbed to 1.8375 on Thursday, but by the time Friday arrived we sank back to 1.8349.

Notable events in the world of currency

An improvement against the Canadian dollar

There was good news here at least, as the pound went from 1.7953 to 1.8121 against the Canadian dollar.

But there would be a drop against the Swiss franc

No good news here though, as the pound fell from 1.5341 to 1.5177.

A small drop against the Icelandic krona

Here we managed to stall the losses, although we still ended up falling from 193.590 to 193.008 by the end of the week.

So there were few points of good news in store this week. We would hope the British pound could improve as time went on, but it was too soon to see how things would progress from here. At least the losses were not huge, not in many areas anyway, so there are always arguments that it could have been worse.

We shall return next week to determine whether the pound was able to improve on this performance in any way, or whether this was part of an ongoing trend. If the pound could improve once again it would certainly make way for a more encouraging report to bring you in the near future.